The online free to play combat sim War Thunder just had a huge new release, adding in an entirely new nation with China and plenty of upgrades elsewhere.

Some highlights include: Night Vision and Thermal Sight devices; Chinese air and ground forces; a map rotation filter; a new sound engine; three new locations; new ground vehicles, helicopters, naval vessels and aircraft for various nations, plus numerous fixes and updates for existing machines and game mechanics.

One of the biggest changes you might hear is the new sound engine, as they've done a big update to FMOD Studio from the old and unsupported Fmod Ex. This upgrade introduces increased positional accuracy of sound, reduced RAM consumption, a better sound mix so if there's an explosion near you the volume of other sound decrease if proportion to it plus lots of entirely new and improved sound effects made it in. You can read more about that specifically here.

They also added in Easy Anti-Cheat to work alongside their existing solutions. They said it would be turned on "soon after the update goes live". Currently then, it's likely that will block anyone playing it through Steam Play rather than the native Linux build. While the native version works fine for me (and continues to do so when tested today), others have reported it to work better for them with Steam Play. Hopefully CodeWeavers and Valve can get EAC supported in Wine/Steam Play soon but no update on that yet.

Find the highlights here, the full changelog here and you can download it on the official site or Steam.

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Easy Anti-Cheat was never designed to work with Wine and Wine will likely need to implement a bunch of things to allow a Windows version of EAC to work.

I'd say it is even worse. EAC (and BattlEye) work based on the idea that they can keep taps on everything that's going on in your system. Working inside a Wine container would contradict that idea and basically be a means to defeat it. So unless there is some big issue in EAC, it is unlikely that the current EAC will ever work in Wine. The only real hope would be that EAC would make some changes to the client that allows it to communicate with a native version of EAC from inside Wine. Which is not unthinkable as proton games do the same with Steam (and SteamVR). But I'm guessing that the funding would need to be generous.

A bigger issue is permissions.. At least for memory resident scanning the anti-cheat would need admin/root and there's no way that's going to happen.. Another is straight heuristics, be it files, memory locations, call stack, etc. They can look very different in Wine, almost cheat like when you consider intercepted DLLs.

So you end up with either an unreliable, castrated anti-cheat or resort to requiring escalated privileges. Even then there is a strong argument to made for pushing that server side.

While i hate cheaters, i really hate the decision to use EAC. Besides the fact that the native version is a bad joke (last time i checked on my old rig i got 20-30fps on native with lowest settings and 100-120 with proton on high settings), EAC's is not really trustworthy enough to have such a wide access to your system...
It's a shame i'll have to ditch a game i've poured thousands of hours in because of something like this -.-

Native is OpenGL3.3, it runs and looks horrid. Even with top end hardware.

Unfortunately EVERY game is now getting EAC Battleye etc... nothing you can do about it. It makes sense if cheating is out of control however, I think i've seen a few games bomb just because of cheaters alone!

EAC and Battleye need to work with Steamplay crew and get it rolling FAST!

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